Getting your priorities right

Once upon a time, when networks carried data alone, prioritising traffic was not necessary. There was plenty of bandwidth for everything – and all traffic was of equal importance. But today, with voice and video as well as richer content and apps, such as IP surveillance, being run across the infrastructure, it makes sense to give some types of traffic priority.

Many organisations are not even aware that they can do this – indeed we still see separate networks being set up to carry IP surveillance or other types of video and voice traffic. This might seem odd in a world where the ‘convergence’ of data and voice networks was supposed to have happened some time ago. It seems even stranger when you consider that Gigabit Ethernet can now be deployed right across the network for not much more outlay than 100Mbps, and when Quality of Service features are available on just about all switches and security devices.

Unused capabilities

As a result, we often find that many of the more advanced features that are supported on our switches and appliances, such as content filtering and applications control are simply never used. It’s the same story with the virtual LAN and QoS features that are supported as standard.

Part of the blame must be laid at our own door. We have probably not done enough in the past to make sure that our partners are aware of all the features and capabilities of our products. The fact that many of them provide support for virtual LANs and for Diffserv, Type of Service and other protocols that fall under the wider QoS umbrella, is not clearly and fully understood by all partners.

We should also be doing more to help them to understand when it makes sense for a customer to step-up to the next level in terms of their bandwidth, and when it makes sense to use prioritisation and QoS features. Or indeed, when a balance between both can be struck.

Return on investment

This is one reason why we always encourage resellers to take the training that is on offer and to qualify as accredited partners. But of course, finding the time to do that is not always easy and for many resellers, it’s not always easy to see where the return is going to come from on that investment in time.

The answer is quite simple though. Understanding how to prioritise traffic will help resellers to add more value for the customer, build loyalty and win more business. If you are confident in talking about prioritisation of network traffic and making use of the various built-in features that are supported as standard features on most of our switches and appliances today, you can put forward proposals that will enable data, voice, video and rich multimedia traffic of all kinds to run across the same network. 

Learning about prioritisation and making it work for customers is not as difficult or taxing as it sounds and once you have that knowledge, you will be able to encourage customers to adopt voice and video on the network and thus create opportunities to sell new products and services for yourself.

James Harris is product manager at networking vendor, ZyXEL